Trucks are moving sand from the north end of Ocean Beach to the south end.

Portions of San Francisco’s historic Great Highway are closed for a massive sand-moving project, part of an effort to slow erosion along the stretch of Pacific coastline known as Ocean Beach. By the end of the project, trucks will have moved about 100,000 cubic yards of sand.

“It’s the equivalent of 31 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “It’s a lot of sand that we’re having to move in a short period of time and that’s why we’re closing down the lanes of the Great Highway to accommodate the truck traffic.”

The worst of the erosion is at the south end of the beach. Luckily, the north end actually has too much sand. The city is working with the National Park Service, to see if moving sand is more effective at stemming erosion than piling up boulders has been. The Park Service controls the south end of the beach, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area known as Fort Funston. The GGNRA and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have been involved in the creation of the Ocean Beach Master Plan, a bold initiative to stem erosion and prepare for sea level rise at Ocean Beach, though this particular project is not a part of that plan.

Southbound lanes of the Great Highway will be off-limits from 6:00 am until 5:00 pm on weekdays. The beach is still accessible, though some parking is affected. The project is supposed to be completed by the end of September.

As an Army Corps of Engineers dredge dumped sand offshore, a crowd of politicians, representatives from local and federal agencies, business owners and volunteers gathered in a crumbling parking lot on Thursday to voice their support for the Ocean Beach Master Plan, a sweeping project to prepare for sea level rise and stem erosion on San Francisco’s western shore.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into taking something from a big visionary idea to a project that’s actually in the pipeline at a public agency,” Grant said.

Some smaller elements of the plan will happen quickly, without much bureaucratic shuffling (such as adding medians to a nearby street, which was tacked on to an existing paving project), but others will take decades.

A truck dumps sand onto Ocean Beach. Sand blowing off of the beach causes road closures on the Great Highway.

Take the Great Highway –“the finest stretch of highway ever constructed”(at least, as it was touted in 1929) – now a road frequently closed by blowing sand and encroaching erosion. The Plan calls for a section of the road to be re-routed away from the coast, what generals like to call “strategic withdrawal” and urban planners refer to as “managed retreat.” That’s dozens of years down the line. Meanwhile, life (and erosion) goes on, and stretches of the road will be repaved beginning this winter.

“It’s going to be quite a number of years, if not decades, before the full process of closing that stretch of road would be implemented,” Grant said. “So it’s not worth not repaving it today.” Even so, a portion of the Great Highway had been closed for sand removal even as officials gathered for Thursday’s event.

“You just cannot fight nature. You’ve gotta respect it.”

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee thanked the host of people who had a hand in crafting the plan, and even threw in a shout-out for a threatened coastal denizen, the snowy plover, but he tempered his congratulations with a reminder about the long process ahead.

“We do have to go through our governmental processes of adoption and review, and make sure that the ideas here also meet the various legal requirements that we’re obligated to carry forth on behalf of the public,” he said. On the other hand, he acknowledged what he’d learned working at San Francisco’s Department of Public Works. “You just cannot fight nature. You’ve gotta respect it,” he said.

Grant says the entire Ocean Beach Master Plan, closely watched as a test case for coastal cities pondering sea rise strategies, will cost about $350 million to implement over 40 years.

As head of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center, Margaret Davidson has her eye firmly on the future of the country’s coasts, and the threats imposed from rising seas and more extreme weather. Davidson is based in South Carolina, but is a close watcher of California, where coast and climate may be on a collision course.

Climate Watch Senior Editor Craig Miller spoke with Davidson about sea level rise and the California coast. Their conversation will air this evening on This Week in Northern California, on KQED Public Television 9.

Here’s a clip that’s not included the TV broadcast.

Read more about San Francisco’s plans to slow erosion and prepare for sea level rise at Ocean Beach:

One of the challenges for the Ocean Beach Master Plan is how to slow the erosion of Ocean Beach's sandy cliffs.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is eroding; that’s not up for debate. But planners are still figuring out the best way to handle the erosion that’s already happening, and how to prepare for sea level rise. And that’s going to take a lot of planning: Ocean Beach itself is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service, but there are also the nearby residential neighborhoods to consider; plus the Great Highway, a wastewater treatment plant, the parking lot at the beach, endangered species, surfers, dog walkers and the occasional hopeful sun bather.

The question facing at least eight local, state and federal agencies boils down to this: With California officials expectingclimate change to raise sea levels here by 14 inches by 2050, should herculean efforts be made to preserve the beach, the pipe and the plant, or should the community simply bow to nature?

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, which is coordinating the Ocean Beach Master Plan, will unveil the final document next month.

As more warnings go out to coastal communities about rising sea levels, local planners are starting to sharpen their pencils. Hence the Ocean Beach Master Plan. The San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR) is facilitating a coordinated effort among multiple agencies to create a “sustainable long-range plan” for San Francisco’s shoreline. Why do we need a plan? Because erosion of the beach and anticipated rising sea levels may necessitate major changes in the infrastructure that serves the area.

In September, economist Philip King of San Francisco State University unveiled a study aimed at putting estimated price tags on potential economic losses from sea level rise, a study in which San Francisco’s Ocean Beach emerged as a major potential loser.

Last week, KQED’s Molly Samuel talked about the Master Plan with Tom Prete, the editor and publisher-in-chief of KQED News associate, The Ocean Beach Bulletin. (Note: Mr. Prete did some work for SPUR previously.)

Edited transcript:

What led up to this plan?

In large part this is a project that goes back many years through multiple permutations of task forces and projects under several different mayors.

There have been people who are concerned that no single agency is responsible for Ocean Beach. The belief is that too many agencies are responsible for too many things and they don’t always talk to each other or pull in the same direction.

So a lot of people who care about Ocean Beach have been trying to get everyone on the same page and create a way forward, something everyone can live with even if they don’t get everything they want.

Explain what agencies are involved with Ocean Beach.

The beach itself is part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), from the O’Shaughnessy Seawall in the north, opposite the beach chalet that you walk up to to get to the Cliff House. Everything to the west, the sand side, is GGNRA, down to the wet sand of the beach. On the other side of that seawall is the parking, which is city property. So the city manages and is responsible for the parking lot, but if you go down those steps, you’re on federal property. Those are the two main agencies.

The CPUC has a great deal of infrastructure that is at or near the beach. There’s a major sewage transport tunnel that lies under the Great Highway, which feeds the oceanside water pollution control plant at the south end of Ocean Beach. That’s city property that is operated by the SF Public Utilities Commission, but the responsibility for maintaining infrastructure like the road and the oceanside water pollution control plant is all done by the SF Dept of Public Works.

In addition there are responsibilities that overlap. The state Dept of Fish and Game, for instance, enforces fishing regulations.

What are some concerns being addressed in the Master Plan?

One of the big challenges Ocean Beach is facing is what will happen if sea levels rise, as it appears they’re going to do. We’re seeing some erosion, especially on the south end of Ocean Beach, that could be attributable simply to singular storms. Those have caused some major problems, including the closure for several months of the southern extension of the Great Highway.

But in addition to those singular events, there is the likelihood that the sea level is going to rise, and when we get large storm surges, they’re going to have a greater impact than they have now. So the question is what is the impact going to be on the beach. Are we going to have a nice sandy beach, or in order to protect some of these things like the Great Highway and the sewer transport tunnel and the water pollution control plant, are we going to have to install large seawalls or something like that?

Does the plan put forward some suggestions on this?

It does. One of the important ideas presented under the draft recommendation for the Ocean Beach master plan would be to reroute that southern extension of the Great Highway that was closed, around the backside of the zoo so that it no longer passes to the west of the water pollution plant, but instead goes around the other side and connects with Sloat Boulevard. So southbound traffic on the Great Highway would no longer go past Sloat and around the water plant to Skyway Blvd around Lake Merced, but instead would turn east on Sloat and meet up with Lake Merced Boulevard to west of the zoo. (Interview continues after the graphic.)

These are big infrastructure suggestions. How do people feel in the neighborhoods around there feel about them?

That’s a really good question. I think in spite of the fact that potentially there will be some major changes, a lot of people aren’t paying a lot of attention to the plan, or if they are it’s not coming through in terms of the voicing of opinions. That in part is due to the scope and scale of the Ocean Beach Master Plan. It’s so large, it encompasses the beach from north to south and plans for several decades, and it’s hard for people to get their minds around .

But I have heard from some readers who are concerned about the Great Highway in particular. I got email from a reader who wondered that if there’s ever a need for emergency transportation out of SF, where are the residents of Richmond and Sunset going to go? How do they get out of the city if they’re not going north over the Golden Gate bridge or east across the city. If they need to go south, how do they get there? The surface roads we have there are not designed to handle a great pulse of traffic like that. the Great Highway is in this reader’s opinion a necessary artery out of the city for those residents.

But one of the questions is: can we maintain the Great Highway there no matter what we do? Is the ocean going to make a decision for us if we don’t make one through the master plan now?

It seems like the sand dunes already make a decision about that with great regularity…

Exactly. The Great Highway is closed frequently for the removal of sand. One thing I often hear out here is people questioning the wisdom of creating a highway out here in the first place. At the time it was built, this part of the city was largely sand dunes still. I find a lot of people in particular are perplexed that anyone would think to build a four-lane road on top of sand dunes. They are not surprised when the road is overtopped by blowing sand or it’s closed when too much sand is on the road. They kind of shake their head and wonder why the road is there in the first place…

SPUR’s plan kind of acknowledges that and moves the traffic from the Great Highway southbound lanes and puts two lanes, bidirectional traffic, on the east side of those, where we have northbound lanes now. it acknowledges we have a lot of blowing sand, and that we need to blunt the impact of major storm events.

So, what is SPUR’s function?

SPUR is a convener and a coordinator for the master plan. The reason they’re there, according to SPUR, is that they have a lot of contacts in the agencies. They know the players already, work with city agencies, and they are a non-partisan organization. They do advocate for some things but they’re not directly an interested party in Ocean Beach. T

What are next steps?

SPUR is in the process of gathering public input on their draft proposals. They are going to take that public input into account to see if they are on the right track. They will come back with a revision later on with the goal of having a completed plan in Feb, 2012.

That’s what a new study seeks to answer in some of the most specific terms yet attempted.

The projections are from a team at San Francisco State University led by economist Philip King, who says in the study release that “Sea level rise will send reverberations throughout local and state economies.” He expects those reverberations to come from the effects of temporary flooding, beach and upland (cliffs and dunes) erosion, which King has estimated for five California locations, using sea-rise scenarios ranging from one-to-two-meters (6.5 feet) by the end of the century.

In addition to damage from extreme weather events and tides, the disappearing beaches themselves represent an opportunity cost. For example, the study estimates that under a mid-range sea rise scenario the “recreational value” of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach could shrink 23% by 2050, and tax revenues from that resource could dwindle by $300,000 (17%) annually. That scenario, which assumes an overall sea rise of 1.4 meters (4.5 feet) this century, estimates the beach’s recreational value at zero by 2100.

Similar scenarios are laid out–with generally less dramatic results–for Malibu, Venice Beach, San Diego (Torrey Pines), and Carpenteria on the south-central coast. King figures that L.A.’s legendary Venice Beach could lose $440 million in tourist dollars by the end of this century.

Locations of the five study sites examined in the King study

Prior studies have put values on the total amount of coastal real estate “at risk” from sea level rise but have mostly stopped short of predicting actual damages.

The complete study is not available online but more information will be posted at the SF State site. The peer-reviewed work was commissioned by the state Dept. of Boating & Waterways.